The horror! The horror!
Oct. 22nd, 2005 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
undyingkingI've ben putting off writing about this, because I couldn't face the true ghastliness of it. But now is the time to face up to destiny...
On Thursday we went to see a play, Sherlock Holmes: the Athenaeum Ghoul. It was bad. Very, very bad. Indeed.
The play itself is a horrible mish-mash -- partly a pastiche, partly a parody, partly a post-modern metafictional kind of wotsit. It fails pretty miserably at all of these ambitions. I can see how some bits might have looked good on paper, but in general it didn't work at all on stage, with only a couple of scenes really being at all effective. And the plot (a) didn't make sense, with vast gaping holes and frustrating nonsenses, and (b) entirely revealed the central mystery in the first scene after the interval, so that for the rest of it we were just waiting to see who'd get killed before the end. (Not eough of them.)
That was bad enough, but also the staging was drab and torpid, with far too many lengthy longueurs where the cast stood around staring vacantly at one another. And of the six actors, only two were any good, one was OK, and the other three were really pretty poor and amateurish.
Really it was only because we were in the middle of the row (and in T's case half-asleep) that we stayed to the end. But still, tearing it apart afterwards was entertaining, I suppose. And it made us appreciate all the more the good productions that come to the Wolsey, like last week's terrific East is East.
Heed the warning of the Ghoul! -- avoid it like the plague!
On Thursday we went to see a play, Sherlock Holmes: the Athenaeum Ghoul. It was bad. Very, very bad. Indeed.
The play itself is a horrible mish-mash -- partly a pastiche, partly a parody, partly a post-modern metafictional kind of wotsit. It fails pretty miserably at all of these ambitions. I can see how some bits might have looked good on paper, but in general it didn't work at all on stage, with only a couple of scenes really being at all effective. And the plot (a) didn't make sense, with vast gaping holes and frustrating nonsenses, and (b) entirely revealed the central mystery in the first scene after the interval, so that for the rest of it we were just waiting to see who'd get killed before the end. (Not eough of them.)
That was bad enough, but also the staging was drab and torpid, with far too many lengthy longueurs where the cast stood around staring vacantly at one another. And of the six actors, only two were any good, one was OK, and the other three were really pretty poor and amateurish.
Really it was only because we were in the middle of the row (and in T's case half-asleep) that we stayed to the end. But still, tearing it apart afterwards was entertaining, I suppose. And it made us appreciate all the more the good productions that come to the Wolsey, like last week's terrific East is East.
Heed the warning of the Ghoul! -- avoid it like the plague!
